Author D. K. Gaston

Sunday, June 15, 2014

I recently watched Rain Fall (2009)
starring Kippei Shina, Gary Oldman, and Kyoko Hasegawa. The movie is
based off the book with the same title, written by Barry Eisler. John
Rain is the protagonist of the story, he's half-American,
half-Japanese, a former US soldier, and government agent. Now an
assassin, his current mission is to eliminate several Japanese politicians,
but make their deaths appear as the results of natural causes.

I've read several books in the John
Rain series, including Rain Fall, the first written by Eisler. The
film was directed by Max Mannix, who directed one other film before
Rain Fall called Dance of the Dragon. Mannix also took on the duty as
screenwriter.

Hard Rain was produced on a shoestring
budget and you could differently see that it suffered because of it.
The director/writer deviated from the book in an attempt to give the
film a Bourne Identity flavor. Gary Oldman plays CIA station chief
William Holzer, who suffers from a severe case of mood swings.
Oldman, of course, is the antagonist. He spends half the movie
screaming, “Jesus Christ,” and looks ready to pull out his hair,
every time things don't go his way. There's also a subplot with a
police detective investigating the death of a man, Rain killed on a
subway train. This of course goes nowhere and further the plot in any
conceivable way. In the book, the CIA Station Chief was someone who
betrayed Rain in the past, while the police detective was an old
friend. The movie completely ignores these details.

Kyoko Hasgawa plays Midori Kawamura,
the love interest for John Rain. She is the daughter of one of Rain's
victims. Hasgawa is perhaps the best part of this movie, giving
dimensions to a character in a sea of cookie cut-out characters. The
director spent little time with the developing relationship between
Kawamura and Rain making it hard for me to swallow that these two
were falling so deeply in love.

The editing of Rain Fall was absolutely
horrible in what I think it was an attempt to cover up the weak fight
scenes. It did improve as the movie progressed, but that may have
only been because later fight scenes did not last more than a few
seconds. Come to think of it, the longest fight in the movie came
midway through when Rain encountered another assassin. If you
blinked, you would have missed the brawl between them.

The actors themselves did a great job
for the material they were working with. Kippei Shina's performance
of John Rain matched that of the character from the book. The
weakness of the film came from writer/director Max Mannix. If perhaps
the film had a bigger budget, Mannix could have made a better movie,
but as it stands now, I would say it's watchable if there's nothing
else on television.

Fight
Fiction is comprised of tales in which the fighting – whether it
happens in a temple in Thailand, a boxing ring in Las Vegas, a cage
in Atlanta, or in a bar in New York City – is not merely in the
story to make it more exciting; or to add a different spin to it. The
fighting must be an integral part of both the story and its
resolution. Take the fighting out and you no longer have a story.
Think Fight Club; Rocky; Blood and
Bone; Kung-Fu Hustle; Million Dollar Baby;
and Tai Chi Zero.

Writing
fight scenes has always been something I enjoy and that I believe I
do fairly well. This is probably due to the fact that I have been a
student of indigenous African martial arts for over forty years and I
have been an instructor of those same martial arts for nearly thirty
years. I am also a lifelong fan of martial arts, boxing and Luchador
films.

Recently,
I joined a team of stellar authors, who all write under the pen name
Jack Tunney (for e-book versions only; paperback versions are in the
authors’ names), as part of the Fight
Card Project.

The
books in the Fight
Card series
are monthly 25,000 word novelettes, designed to be read in one or two
sittings, and are inspired by the fight pulps of the 1930s and 1940s,
such as Fight
Stories Magazine and
Robert E. Howard’s two-fisted boxing tales featuring Sailor Steve
Costigan.

In
2013, the Fight Card series published twenty-four
incredible tales of pugilistic pandemonium from some of the best New
Pulp authors in the business. I am writing under the Fight
Card MMA brand with my book, Fist of Africa.

Here’s
a brief synopsis:

Nigeria
2004 … Nicholas ‘New Breed’ Steed, a tough teen from the mean
streets of Chicago, is sent to his mother’s homeland – a tiny
village in Nigeria – to avoid trouble with the law. Unknown to
Nick, the tiny village is actually a compound where some of the best
fighters in the world are trained. Nick is teased, bullied and
subjected to torturous training in a culture so very different from
the world where he grew up.

Atlanta
2014 … After a decade of training in Nigeria, a tragedy brings Nick
back to America. Believing the disaffected youth in his home town
sorely need the same self-discipline and strength of character
training in the African martial arts gave him, Nick opens an Academy.
While the kids are disinterested in the fighting style of the
cultural heritage Nick offers, they are enamored with mixed martial
arts. Nick decides to enter the world of mixed martial arts to make
the world aware of the effectiveness and efficiency of the martial
arts of Africa.

Pursuing
a professional career in MMA, Nick moves to Atlanta, Georgia, where
he runs into his old nemesis – Rico Stokes, the organized crime
boss who once employed Nick’s father, wants Nick to replace his
father in the Stokes’ protection racket. Will New Breed Steed claim
the Light Heavyweight title … Or will the streets of Atlanta claim
him?

I
really enjoyed writing this book because I have always wanted to
share with the world the fierceness, efficiency and effectiveness of
the indigenous African martial arts for self-defense, as well as
their transformative powers in the building of men and women with
self-discipline, courage and good character. Fist of
Africa is a perfect outlet for my unique brand of Fight
Fiction, which I am sure you will enjoy reading as much as I enjoyed
writing it.

In Fist
of Africa, readers will experience jaw-dropping action on the
mean streets of Chicago, in the sand pits of Nigeria and in cages in
the “Dirty South” (Atlanta), as well as a bit of romance.

Please,
enjoy this excerpt, then hop on over to my website,
or to Amazon
and purchase the book. You’ll thank me later.

ROUND
SIX

Vee-Vee’s
was packed. The line of men and women spilled out of the Nigerian
restaurant and onto the hot sidewalk as the lunch crowd eagerly
awaited the mouth-watering, sweet fried plantains, egusi soup with
pounded yam and coconut rice.

Standing
in the line, Nick and Baba Yemi still had two customers ahead of them
before they were in the door. Nick rubbed his hands in excitement.

“You
just don’t know, grandfather,” Nick replied. “I haven’t had
Vee-Vee’s in over ten years.

“You’ve
had Nigerian food in Nigeria,” Baba Yemi said. “What’s
so special about Vee-Vee’s?”

“It’s
Vee-Vee’s,” Nick responded with a shrug.

Baba
Yemi shook his head.

“Excuse
me, you just jumped ahead of me,” a woman’s voice said.

Nick
peered over his shoulder. A rotund woman addressed three young men
who stood in front of her in the line.

“Look,
lady, we just want to get some plantains up out of here,” one of
the young men – a lanky teen with jeans hanging halfway off his
butt – said. “You look like you’re about to order the whole
damned menu.”

The
young men laughed heartily and exchanged high fives.

“Teens
today have no respect,” the woman said. “If you are the future,
we’re in big trouble.”

The
old wrestler side-stepped to his left, bringing his right arm up to
scoop the young man’s leg. Baba Yemi shifted toward the trapped
leg, grabbing it with both arms in a tight grip. He ducked under the
leg, lifting his arms over his head at the same time.

The
young man’s knee twisted at a sickening angle. He landed next to
his friend with the dislocated wrist, who joined him in a chorus of
cries, whimpers and yelps.

Baba
Yemi exploded toward the remaining member of the trio.

The
young man stumbled backward, then whirled on his heels and sprinted
off.

The
teen with the sagging pants and damaged wrist helped the young man
with the dislocated knee to his feet. “Sorry, ma’am,” they said
in unison.

Baba
Yemi laid a hand on the shoulder of the young man with the sagging
pants. The young man jerked in fear.

“Relax,”
Baba Yemi said. “Let me fix it.”

The
young man cautiously gave Baba Yemi his damaged hand. The old man
grabbed the teen’s fingers and yanked hard. The teen winced at the
pain of his wrist sliding back into its correct position.

“Thank
you,” the young man said. “And I … I’m sorry.”

“What
about my knee, sir?” The Spanish-speaking young man inquired, still
gasping in pain.

“That
is going to require more treatment than I can do here,” Baba Yemi
answered. “Do either of you have a car?”

“Yes,
sir, I do,” the Spanish-speaking youth said.

“What’s
your name, boy?” Baba Yemi asked.

“Hector,
sir,” the young man said.

“And
yours?” Baba Yemi asked the young man with the sagging trousers.

“Miles,”
he answered.

“Miles,
take Hector to the hospital,” Baba Yemi said. “They’ll put the
joint back in proper position, then you bring him to me and I’ll
really heal him. Talk to my grandson over there. He’ll give you the
address.”

“Yes,
sir,” Miles said, approaching Nick.

“Thank
you, sir,” Hector said.

Vee-Vee’s
waitress, who had come outside to see what the commotion was all
about, handed Nick an ink pen and an order slip. Nick wrote the
address to his parent’s house on the slip.

The
two young men shambled off, Hector’s arm wrapped around Miles’
shoulder for support.

“Thank
you!” The pudgy woman shouted. She wrapped her arms around Baba
Yemi’s torso and held him in a warm hug.

The
people in line applauded as Baba Yemi returned to his place in line.

“We’re
running a compound for young thugs out of my parents’ house now?”
Nick said, shaking his head.

“You
weren’t so different when you first came to me, Nicholas,” Baba
Yemi said.

Monday, April 28, 2014

I love fiction. Period. Worlds imagined, worlds altered,
whether simply reshaped or irrevocably twisted. Anything that fires the
imagination is a gift from the gods. I grew up on Star Trek, the Twilight Zone,
Sir Graves Ghastly’s Saturday Matinee Movies (for us Motown folks), and the
other-realm lives of a bunch of kids ganged up against one named Charlie Brown.
Peanuts was “Village of the Damned”
minus the world domination, mixed with a psychic dog trying its best to be
human.

Which
is to say all fiction is speculative fiction. That’s what the spirit of the
Butler/Banks tour celebrates, because how else can you get away with writing
things like this (from Historical
Inaccuracies):

“The only evidence I need of Intelligent
Design,” said Senator Bloodaxe, unsheathing his crusted blade and laying it
before the security dogs for evidence of illegal killing, “is what I have seen
with my own eyes.”

“But, Senator,” someone said from
the throng of pelt-clad reporters, “isn’t it true you were once a staunch
supporter of the scientific prin—”

“Who said that!” Bloodaxe raged,
grabbing up the sword that had sent scores of unbelievers to undeserved glory
and swinging it round.

The news crews were used to his
rages and smoothly raised shields. The senator calmed.

“Senator, it’s been rumored,” came a
crisp, female voice from beneath the turtle’s back of shields, “that you
yourself have killed angels and that this conversion is purely political.”

Movement issued from the rear.
Reporters parted until she stood before Bloodaxe (R) from Indiana. The huge man’s eyes narrowed.

“I am Kurok, daughter’s daughter of
Couric,” which sucked balls because politicians hated a reporter with something
to prove.

“Bring it, wench.”

Kurok approached. “Today is a good
day to cry…”

HISTORICAL INACCURACIES contains several science/speculative
fiction selections, including the pile-driver “Revolver,” praised by Lois
Tilton of Locus Online as “harrowing” and one that delivers. These are stories
meant to disturb the dust, call forth the spirits, and sit with you a while.

As Clarence Young, I write humor and drama. As Zig Zag Claybourne I wish I’d grown up with the powers of either Gary Mitchell or Charlie X but without the Kirk confrontations. My fiction and poetry, ranging from science fiction to street-lit satire to magic realism, have appeared in The Wayne Review, Flashshot, Reverie Journal, Stupendous Stories, and numerous online attractions. The books Neon Lights, By All Our Violent Guides, and Historical Inaccuracies are all independently-published.

Sunday, April 27, 2014

Thanks for checking out the work of all the authors
participating in The 2014 Butler/Banks
Book Tour. This is a huge year for many of us, and we couldn’t do what we
love without the support of YOU, our readers! I hope you’ve been exposed to
your next favorite author and encourage you to leave honest reviews of our work wherever you purchased it! Your feedback
to other readers who share your interest is pure gold for indy authors.

Please enjoy the excerpt from my first novel, The Seedbearing Prince: Part Iposted below. You can download it
for FREEon Amazon for a
limited time! The Seedbearing Prince:
Part II is also available—click here!

Dayn Ro’Halan’s adventures will continue in The Course of Blades, to be released
this summer—the third of six total books in the World Breach series. I’m really
excited about this novel, it’s going to be the best one yet.

That being said…let’s do a giveaway!

Rules are simple: send me a picture of yourself READING a
novel by ANY AUTHOR on The Butler/Banks
Book Tour. You use an e-reader? Great.Reading in costume, or upside down? Even better! Go crazy—just keep it
SFW please! Share with me on Facebook,Twitter, or Instagram.

I’ll post your pictures to my Facebook and happily send you
a FREE ebook of The Seedbearing Prince: Part II OR “The Course of Blades” when it
is released this summer. We’ll all pretty much be famous together. It’s all so
clear to me.

Let the photobomb commence, because this giveaway ends with
the last day of the Butler/Banks Book Tour, April 30th!

The Seedbearing Prince Part I: Prologue

The
torrent shifted again, and a thousand shards of onyx flashed to fire as Corian
swept through a roiling field of ice and stone. The sheath on his worn black
armor held, but would not last much longer. The stream of rock in the space
between the worlds drifted slower here, and boasted several floating mountains
large enough to hold a layer of air. Green ferns covered the surface of the
nearest, providing plenty of cover. Corian was tempted to stop and rest, but
crater wolves likely roamed in such thick foliage. The entire World Belt hung
on the message he bore to the Ring, and he could rest after his task was done.

A field of red granite stretched in the space above him like
the bizarre clouds of some nightmare, the individual boulders careening off
each other by the hundreds. Only the hardest minerals and metals endured the
endless pounding of the rock flow, and only the most foolish men would brave
such a swath of torrent. They were moving the direction he needed to go, into
the flow where the rock moved fastest. In
the torrent, speed kills, he reminded himself. He was the best courser
among the Ring’s Guardians, but the rock never cared.

Corian deftly attached a new talon to what remained of his
silver wingline, then heaved it. The metal hook took hold, his wingline snapped
taut, and the boulder yanked Corian into the flow. He repeated the process,
each time roping a boulder moving faster, until his last guide rock pulled him
along at hundreds of spans a second. A layer of white frost appeared on his
armor and mask in a blink. He reeled himself in and clung to the red surface,
like a flea riding a river bison in the middle of a stampeding herd. He watched
every direction at once from his perch, digging his gauntlets into the
crumbling surface. The boulder was actually some ancient rusted metal, not
granite as he first thought. The torrent here was so thick he could barely see
the stars, and it filled his ears with a distant roar.

He sped along this way
for some time, until he spied a pockmarked mass of stone and iron, large as a
dwarf moon. A cleft right down the middle threatened to split the entire thing
in half. A tower in the northern axis had seen more than its fair share of rust,
but the light strobing from it pulsed regularly, illuminating the smaller rocks
orbiting around it. As a whole, the wayfinder was ugly and old, but the mass of
rock was the most blessed sight Corian could imagine after a week of surviving
the torrent’s attempts to grind him to powder.

His next wingline took
him closer. If the wayfinder was powered as well as he suspected, he could use
the array inside it to find out where he was in the torrent, and see how close
the Ring lay. He might even find food and water, if peace favored him. A fellow Guardian must stop here often for
such an old wayfinder to be this well preserved, he thought.

Smaller debris pelted the wayfinder’s old crust,
disintegrating in flashes of light. The surface shone with hundreds of impacts,
large and small. Corian chose a crater near the old tower, perhaps seventy
spans deep with high walls that would offer good angles to slow himself as he
approached.

As he prepared to throw out another talon, dark shapes
poured from the wayfinder’s cleft. He stared for a moment, incredulous. There
could be no crater wolves on a wayfinder, with no game to hunt, unless they
were marooned after striking some other erratic in the torrent. No, those
shapes moved with a military precision, more lethal than the deadliest pack. He
could see them clearly now, massive men covered in black. “No. Not here!”
Corian barely recognized his own weary voice.

The voidwalkers had seen him. A pinprick of light shone on
the wayfinder’s surface, brighter than the tower’s regular strobe. He eyed it
mistrustfully as he searched for a place to throw his next wingline and change
his momentum. He spotted a tumbling boulder half covered with ice, moving away
from the wayfinder too fast.

The light near the voidwalkers flashed. A beam of energy
rushed into Corian’s path, hot as molten steel. A lifetime of coursing
experience kicked in, and he curled his legs up until his knees touched his
ears, rolling forward. The strange fire passed underneath him by less than a
span. He could feel the heat of it through his protective layer of sheath. The
beam burned past, and slammed into a rock fifty spans away. The tumbling
boulder barely even slowed in its course, but the spot where the weapon
struck—for there was no question that is what it was—glowed red hot at the
edges. The glistening center had cooled quick as glass.

Another pinprick of light. He twisted around in the
weightlessness of the void to point his feet back toward the wayfinder and make
himself a smaller target. It did no good. The beam rushed straight at him, and
his world turned red with pain.

An impact jarred him awake. Another. Corian opened his eyes.
I’m much too cold. The voidwalker
weapon had burned away his sheath. Layers of his black armor were peeling away
from the metal plates like paper curled in a fire. He had been caught in a
tangle of purple-rooted vines intertwined in a mile long cluster of the
floating rock, what Jendini coursers called a knotted forest. The roots were
nearly hard as stone in places. Dusty old bones from animals Corian did not
even recognize littered the tangles. Debris from the torrent stretched around
the forest in every direction, and errant stones pelted the mass of vines,
which he immediately recognized. Courser’s
nap, the whole forest is covered with it.

Corian reached into a compartment on his armored belt and
removed his last flask of sheath. He applied the clear liquid to his ruined
armor in quick, smooth motions, not leaving one inch exposed. The sheath locked
together in small patches of light, and his body’s heat immediately began to
warm the interior of the invisible, protective barrier. Once the sheath was
gone, his armor would not prevent the smallest pebble from killing him, if one
struck him moving fast enough. For the first time, Corian considered that he
may not survive.

This was to be his last circuit as a Guardian for the Ring,
and he held the hope that he would look into his grandchildren’s eyes back on
Jendini now that his service was finished. Yet his duty hung over him, heavier
than ever. In the distance he could see the world of Shard, verdant and green
just beyond the torrent’s chaos. His resolve hardened.

He slipped a speechcaster into his mouth and began to speak
as he worked himself free of the tangled vines. The small wafer could hold his
words in secret for a few days, should things go badly here.

“I am Corian Nightsong, a Guardian of the Ring. There are
Thar’Kuri warriors on the world of Nemoc. The voidwalkers have built a device
that allows them to…teleport themselves at will through the Belt. They are
gathering in numbers, preparing for an attack. There are captives from all over
the worlds imprisoned on Nemoc. The voidwalkers have weapons unlike anything
known from the Ring. They use energy and can attack over great distances. They
must have been made in the age before the Breach.

If you knew where to
look for this message, you must deliver it with all haste to Force Lord Adazia
on the Ring. The worlds all depend on you, for I have failed them.” The
admission filled Corian with bitterness, but he forced a strength he no longer
felt into his words. “My sons and daughters live in Denkstone, on Jendini. Tell
them…their father served well.”

One of the vines tangled around his torso began to quiver.
Corian looked down, fearing a leaf, but instead he saw a voidwalker, climbing
toward him. Corian was tall, but the hulking brute easily overtopped him by a
head. His glistening black armor looked as if it were melted to his frame, and
covered him from head to toe save two dark slits for his eyes. The vines broke
like dried mud in the voidwalker’s grasp.

Corian began to climb, scrambling further into the vines. He
did not bother to draw his sword, the voidwalker would overpower him in moments
if they were to fight.

“So afraid of an old courser?” Corian shouted. He pulled at
every vine in his path as he fled, but most of them were stiff and gray. Living
vines of the courser’s nap were purple and sticky, but the true danger lay with
the leaves.

The voidwalker’s gravelly voice called to Corian, cold as an
orphan’s gravestone. “Come to me, degenerate.”

Corian drew his sword, and began slashing his way through
the vines. They sparked as his blade struck, but gave way. He leapt through an
open space nearly ten spans across. The voidwalker followed without hesitation.
So strong. Corian knew the brute
meant to take him alive. He could not allow that.

He landed on a solid gray swath, fleshy beneath his feet. He
rolled and lunged just as the leaf stirred. A row of spikes slipped out of the
edges, thick as Corian’s leg and sharp enough to cleave a horse in two. Corian
barely cleared them. The voidwalker was not so lucky. His momentum carried him
right into the center of the carnivorous plant, which enveloped him with a
twist of blue-veined leaf. Steam issued from the folds near the plant’s edges
as it fed.

More pods of the
courser’s nap were coming to life, enlivened by the voidwalker’s screams.
Corian avoided the leaves wherever they stirred. He climbed and lunged and
dived through the vines, soon pulling himself to the edge of the knotted
forest. Pure torrent lay before him, an endless landscape of chaotic rock.
There was no clear flow in any direction, the individual boulders in the
skyscape crashed into each other in a hundred shattering impacts. I’ll leap blind and pray that my sheath
holds.

Another voidwalker tore himself out of the vines a few spans
away. Peace, but look at the size of him!
The voidwalker’s armor looked as chewed up as the oldest rocks of the torrent,
endless dents and scratches plastered the black surface.

“I’ve enjoyed hunting you, degenerate.”

Another courser’s leaf
reared up behind the voidwalker as he lumbered toward Corian. The leaf lunged
and took the voidwalker up, curling round and round as the folds of leaf
tightened. Corian allowed himself a moment of elation, but it was short lived.
A pale hand appeared on the side of the courser’s nap, and bright green fluid
poured out. The leaf whipped back and forth, emitting a piercing shriek as the
voidwalker pulled it apart piece by piece from the inside. Corian needed to see
no more. He leaped, and prayed the torrent would show him mercy.

Friday, April 25, 2014

Griots: Sisters of the Spear picks
up where the ground breaking Griots Anthology leaves off. Charles R. Saunders
and Milton J. Davis present seventeen original and exciting Sword and Soul
tales focusing on black women. Just as the Griots Anthology broke ground as the
first Sword and Soul Anthology, Griots: Sisters of the Spear pays homage to the
spirit, bravery and compassion of women of color. Seventeen authors and eight artists combine
their skills to tell stories of bravery, love, danger and hope. The griots have
returned to sing new songs, and what wonderful songs they are!

Excerpt
for Griots: Sisters of the Spear

SPEARING
STEREOTYPES

By Charles
R. Saunders

The woman in Andrea Rushing’s evocative painting that graces the
cover of Griots: Sisters of the Spear symbolizes the essence of the anthology.
Although the painting is not a direct depiction of any of the characters in the
stories, the spirit of this woman imbues all of them. She is a teller of truth,
and a slayer of stereotypes.

As is the case with black men, black women have been subjected
to invidious stereotyping for centuries in real life and fiction alike. For the
most part, these characterizations have ranged from the condescending to the
downright hostile – from the faithful “Mammy” of Gone with the Wind to the
scornful “Sapphire” of Amos ‘n’ Andy to the degraded “Ho” made infamous in
all-too-many rap-music lyrics. The fantasy-fiction genre is no exception. Until
recently, black women have been either non-existent, or portrayed in ways that
made absence the preferable alternative.

Real life defies the stereotypes. Throughout history, there has
been no dearth of strong and courageous black women who have stood alongside –
and sometimes in front of – their men and children during the course of a
500-year-long struggle against oppression in Africa, and the places in the rest
of the world to which Africans were taken against their will to fuel economies
with their forced labor.

A few examples: The Candace, or queen, of Kush defied the
legions of ancient Rome. Queen Nzinga of Ndongo in central Africa fought to
protect her people from the depredations of European slavers. Harriet Tubman
risked her life to lead slaves to freedom in the years before the U.S. Civil
War. Fannie Lou Hamer endured vicious physical abuse from the authorities in
her non-violent quest to win basic civil rights for black Americans. Women such
as these – and many more like them – stand as living contradictions to the
misrepresentations that persist to this day.

So do the women in Sisters of the Spear. When Milton Davis came
up with the idea of a woman-themed sequel to our first anthology, Griots, I
co-signed immediately. Like Griots, Sisters of the Spear presents an
opportunity to bring more black representation to a genre that’s still in need
of more color. Thanks to Griots, we knew there were more than a few writers and
artists of all racial persuasions who would embrace our theme of powerful black
womanhood and create stories and illustrations that would be excellent by any
standard.

Our expectations have been more than fulfilled. Our modern-day
griots came through with – not to belabor the point – flying colors. The
fictional warrior-women and sorceresses you will meet in the following pages
can hold their own and then some against the barbarians and power-mad monarchs
and magic-users of both genders who swing swords and cast spells in the mostly
European-derived settings of modern fantasy and sword-and-sorcery. The reach of
sword-and soul has expanded greatly with Sisters of the Spear.

It’s time now to allow the woman on the cover serve as your
guide through the anthology. The light she carries will illuminate the truth
that is always inherent in the best of fiction. And her spear will slay the
stereotypes.